Summer 2019 | Essays 67

D u s t i n Fr i e d m a n

Weird Sex:
Teleny and the History of Sexuality

T
he story usually goes like this: in 1890 Oscar Wilde purchased
a number of French novels and books ‘designated by the euphemism
of “socratic” ’ from Charles Hirsch, a clandestine erotic bookseller in
London. Some days later, Wilde dropped off at Hirsch’s establishment a ‘tied up
1

and carefully sealed’ manuscript (p. 172). This document was called for, taken away,
and returned three times by three different men before Hirsch’s curiosity finally
drove him to open the package. Inside, he found the jointly-written manuscript
version of what would eventually be published as Teleny or the Reverse of the
Medal: A Physiological Romance of To-Day (1893), which Brian Reade claims was
‘the one English novel until then in which the main story was concerned with
homosexuality at its fullest extent’.2 The novel describes the sexual awakening of
Camille Des Grieux, a young businessman, through an affair with the Hungarian
pianist René Teleny. Hirsch, impressed by what he called the ‘extended scholarship,
[…] elegant style, [and] sustained dramatic interest’ of the book’s defense of same-
sex desire, claimed to have heard no more about Teleny until it appeared three
years later under the Cosmopoli erotica imprint published by Leonard Smithers,
who would soon become famous as the publisher of England’s major decadent
authors (p. 173). It was produced in a richly bound edition of two hundred copies
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selling for five guineas each. According to Hirsch, however, the Cosmopoli edition
differed significantly from the handwritten manuscript he read: it switched the
setting of the action from London to France (supposedly Paris, though this
version of the novel never specifies the city by name) and removed the original
manuscript’s prologue.3
This narrative of Teleny’s genesis has been irresistibly suggestive for critics,
especially those who have used the novel to reconstruct a crucial moment in the
history of Western sexuality. Prominently featuring Wilde, the man considered by
many to be the originator of the modern image of the homosexual, as he organizes
the circulation of a text jointly written by a group of men as they take turns
describing their desires and the unique sense of self those desires imply, Hirsch’s
story operates almost perfectly as an allegory for the formation of homosexual
self-identification at the Victorian fin de siècle. The key elements are all there:
secrecy that paradoxically provides an enabling opportunity for the inscription of
homoerotic desire; the clandestine textual circulation that creates the foundation
for sexual identity; and a defense of that new identity category through recourse
to the rhetoric of biological ‘naturalness’. Teleny would appear to encapsulate the
various discursive forces operating at the watershed moment when, as Michel
Foucault famously writes in the History of Sexuality, ‘the aberration’ of the
‘sodomite’ transforms into the ‘species’ of the ‘homosexual’.4
The problem, however, is that this oft-repeated story is entirely apocryphal.
Hirsch did not offer his history of Teleny’s composition until 1934, some forty-one
years after its initial publication, in the preface to his French translation of the text.
While Hirsch claimed his edition was based on the original manuscript, switching
the location ‘back’ to London and including the ‘original’ prologue, there is no
documentary evidence to support any of his claims. Until quite recently, however,
this dubious story was repeated with greater or lesser degrees of credulity in nearly
every major analysis of the novel for the past four decades.
Why has this story been seized upon so readily? I argue that a close
examination of the novel’s most explicitly pornographic scenes reveals that they
do not anticipate the bourgeois, individualistic liberal gay subject described by
Foucault and suggested by allegorical readings of Hirsch, but are instead more
closely related to the cosmic horrors found in the genre of weird fiction. While
Hirsch’s account is some of the only information we have about the origins of
this historically significant yet mysterious text, critics’ determination to make
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interpretive hay out of this dubious story, to the point where it becomes central to
their arguments about Teleny, also points to a determined investment in a particular
conceptual framework for understanding the history of Victorian sexuality.
Recurrent references to Wilde’s involvement with the lost original
manuscript of Teleny are, among other things, an attempt to lend literary and
historical credibility to an otherwise disreputable text. Critics thereby reenact a
phenomenon not commonly associated with gay pornography, but with another
less-than-respectable mode of writing also that also developed in England during
the 1890s: weird fiction. Leif Sorensen and Roger Luckhurst have both identified
‘pseudobiblia, the invention of fake books, fake libraries, and fake traditions’ as
a literary strategy that ‘lies at the core of the weird archive’ going back to the
late Victorian tales of Arthur Machen and M. R. James.5 According to Sorensen,
pseudobiblia is an attempt to make up for the ‘lack [of the] kind of institutional
standing that renders an archive official or legitimate’, and fulfils the need to
belong to an alternative canon that does not actually exist.6 Smithers, one of the
only publishers willing to take on Wilde’s works after his imprisonment, claimed
in his ‘Adverts Prospectus’ for Teleny that it contained ‘scenes which surpassed in
freedom the wildest license’, and ‘the culture of its author’s style’, a phrase Amanda
Mordavsky Caleb asserts was meant to punningly suggest Wilde’s involvement
with the original version of the text without affirming it explicitly.7 Due in part
to this connection, Smithers claimed that Teleny’s handling of the combination of
literary polish with homosexual eroticism was an innovation worthy of a minor
form of canonicity: ‘It is a book’, he said, ‘which will certainly rank as the chief
of its class, and it may truthfully be said to make a new departure in English
amatory literature’.8 Joseph Bristow states that the text of Teleny itself is notable
for ‘situating the main characters’ same-sex yearnings in a far-reaching tradition
that links rebellious romantics like Shelley to classical writers such as Plato.
Unquestionably, Teleny’s wealth of cultural references […] suggests that this
work sought to lend scholarly authority to its impentitent portrayal of gay sex’.9
References to the lost original manuscript of Teleny are, despite their appearance
in legitimate academic criticism, similar to weird fiction’s creation of a legacy for
imaginary occult texts like the Necronomicon, which was first referred to in the
writings of H. P. Lovecraft and subsequently proliferated in texts by later authors.
Both Teleny and weird fiction writing inhabited the same decadent cultural
milieu. In 1892, the year before he published Teleny, Smithers published Machen’s
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translation of the French pornographic text The Memoirs of Jacques. Machen’s

most famous early novels, The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (1894) and The
Three Imposters: or, the Transmutations (1895), were all published in the Bodley
Head’s decadent Keynotes series.10 After the scandal of the Wilde trials in 1895,
the publisher John Lane requested that Machen expurgate The Three Imposters, a
novel which, while not explicitly pornographic, describes the titular characters
wandering the streets of London in search of a coin commemorating an orgy put
on by the Roman Emperor Tiberius and culminates in a mysterious, violent, and
implicitly sexual pagan ritual.11 The setting of Teleny in London (or Paris), with its
depictions of clandestine gay sex parties in aristocratic homes and phantasmagoric
public spaces cruised by ‘night-walkers […] sickening faces of effete, womanish
men […] trying to beguile [him] by all that is nauseous’, that give Des Grieux
a ‘creepy feeling’ that ‘nevertheless was so entirely new that I must say it rather
interested [one]’, anticipates depictions of urban wandering in search of the
perverse found in both The Three Imposters and Machen’s The London Adventure; or,
the Art of Walking (1924) (pp. 85, 87, 86). In this latter volume, Machen describes
‘the magic touch which redeems and exalts the dullness of things’ found in
‘unknown, unvisited square’ and introduces, in Luckhurst’s words, ‘the possibility
of levering open other realities of the mundane world by stumbling across them’.12
In Teleny, this other world is the underground gay social and sexual network that
hides its luridness just below the surface of everyday life in the metropolis.
While there does not seem to be definitive evidence that Machen was
influenced directly by Teleny or vice versa, I maintain that these connections are
more than merely incidental, and moreover, that their implications have been
obscured by the desire to write Teleny into a Foucauldian version of the history of
sexuality. While it is clear that the novel is first and foremost a gay pornographic
text, many episodes exhibit qualities more commonly associated with the weird.
Lovecraft, in his well-known essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927),
asserts:

Most of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing

in memorable fragments scattered through material whose
massed effect may be of a very different cast. […] If the proper
sensations are excited, such a ‘high spot’ must be admitted on
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its own merits as weird literature, no matter how prosaically it

is later dragged down.13

This definition has led James Machin to describe the weird as a literary ‘mode’
rather than a genre, giving one ‘free rein to identify “weird elements” in other
works that could never convincingly be wholly appropriated as weird fiction, were
it a genre’.14
It is certainly true that Teleny presents to us what looks like a recognizably
modern understanding of gay identity, written as it was during an era when law
and medicine were creating new sexual typologies and categories. Yet the presence
of the weird mode in one of the earliest identifiably ‘homosexual’ texts suggests
that we should reconsider elements of the now-standard accounts of the history
of sexuality that has taken root in Victorian studies. Like weird fiction, Teleny
can also be read as a response to ‘scientific discovery in the nineteenth century’
which, Luckhurst writes, ‘dethroned anthropocentric conceptions of the world’.15
Although it is not often considered in the context of weird fiction, this would
include the Victorian pseudoscience of sexology, which portrayed sexual ‘perverts’
as individuals without agency, victims of uncontrollable pathological impulses. As
scientific authorities consolidated their power to define the subject, they took away
queers’ ability to define themselves, delimiting them to the monstrous, criminally
degenerate body of the sexual pervert. As Foucault famously states, this made
‘his sexuality […] the root of all his actions, because it was their insidious and
indefinitely active principle’. 16
Sonja Ruehl writes that for Foucault, sexual ‘categories have a rigidifying
effect, imprisoning individuals whose lives are administered under them’.17
Attempts to characterize Teleny as part of what he calls the ‘reverse discourse’ of
homosexuality—a conscious response to the prison of gay identity by defending
same-sex desire as innate, natural, and nonthreatening—domesticate what is most
disturbing about the novel: its often horrific portrayals of homo- and heteroerotic
desire operating outside the logic of individual intention, intertwining with a drive
to annihilate both the subject and the object of erotic desire.
Lovecraft defined the weird as a

breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces.

[…] There must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and
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portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible

conception of the human brain—a malign and particular
suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our
only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of
unplumbed space.18

Similarly, Teleny depicts all sexual acts, both homosexual and heterosexual, as
embodying a fantastic yet nevertheless entirely material energy that erupts into
everyday life and violates the ostensibly ‘natural’ laws of Victorian domestic
ideology. Rather than attempting to redeem gay identity from pathology, Teleny
universalizes sexology’s dehumanization of the sexual subject. It shows how all
forms of sexuality, when examined with the intensity and attention to detail
characteristic of pornography, expose the chaos underlying the ‘fixed laws of
Nature’, sharing weird fiction’s desire to destroy the philosophical foundations
of liberal-humanist subjectivity. The novel turns sexology’s pathologizing of
the homosexual body on its head not by reversing the discourse, but instead by
showing sexual desire to be an impersonal force that is cosmically indifferent to
the minds and bodies it inhabits.

Reversing the Reverse Discourse

To be sure, there are a small number of moments in Teleny that seem to anticipate
modern liberal defenses of homosexuality. Des Grieux, the novel’s protagonist and
narrator, asks

Had I committed a crime against nature when my own nature

found peace and happiness thereby? If I was thus, surely it was
the fault of my blood, not of myself. Who had planted nettles
in my garden? Not I. They had grown there unawares, from my
very childhood. (p. 107)

This is an early version of a biologically essentialist, ‘born-this-way’ understanding

of same-sex desire as rooted in bodily difference and unchangeable. This has
led critics to emphasize that the historical moment that produced Teleny also
produced the ‘reverse discourse’ of homosexuality. According to Foucault,
nineteenth-century medical and legal discourse effectively created the deviant and
Summer 2019 | Essays 73

pathological ‘homosexual’ subjects whose sexual practices they sought to regulate.

Yet this process resulted in homosexuals consciously embracing this identity. The
reverse discourse is when homosexuality ‘began to speak on its own behalf, to
demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same
vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified’.19
Homosexuals themselves thus actively participated in the ‘multiple and mobile
field of force relations wherein far-reaching, but never completely stable, effects of
domination are produced’.20
As Aaron Ho argues in his assessment of the novel’s critical history, studies
of Teleny ‘apply […] Foucauldian theory’ as an ‘unquestioned’ analytical paradigm
for understanding its depiction of late Victorian homosexuality.21 They proffer a
historicized reading that characterizes the novel as historical evidence from a key
moment in the development of modern sexual identities. Ed Cohen, in his well-
known and influential article ‘Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the
Closet of Representation’ (1987), portrays Wilde as Teleny’s ‘general editor and
coordinator’ and states that even if Hirsch’s account of its genesis ‘proves apocryphal,
the unevenness of its prose styles suggests that the novel was the collaboration
of several authors and possibly a set of self-representations evolving out of the
homosexual subculture in late Victorian London’.22 This assumption supports
Cohen’s argument that the narrative is ‘a counterhegemonic representation of
homoerotic desire’ and affirms ‘the naturalness of […] homoerotic experience’ by
presenting the ‘new joyous possibility’ of gay identity. 23
Even studies that have attempted to revise Cohen’s thesis operate under the
assumption that the novel represents a coherent vision of gay identity more or
less identical to the one we know today. Lisa Sigel repeats the Hirsch story to
call attention to ‘the simultaneous arrival of a gay identity […] and a full-fledged
consumer culture’, and uses the novel as evidence of the connection between those
two discourses as ‘one of the first pornographic novels to explore homosexuality as
an identity rather than a practice’.24 Similarly, Matt Cook uses Hirsch’s narrative
as evidence for the existence of ‘a circle of men, possibly centered around Wilde,
working together to construct a decadent fantasy of homosexual life and sex in
London’.25 For Diane Mason, Teleny exposes the ‘problematic’ nature of ‘this early
point in recognisable gay history’, insofar as its attempts to defend same-sex desire
rely on the ‘medical models’ provided by sexologists, and are thus ‘curative rather
than celebratory’.26 As Leo Bersani has argued, the effect of this assumption
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has been that literary historians of sexuality present the late Victorian era as the
moment when ‘an intentionally oppositional gay identity’ was developed that ‘by
its very coherence, only repeat[ed] the restrictive and immobilizing analyses it
set out to resist’.27 Foucault argues that oppressive power structures discursively
bring into being those identities they ostensibly repress in order to consolidate the
networks of power themselves. Thus, the repressive hypothesis can only function if
the ideal of liberation remains available to the homosexual subject.
These studies tend to ignore the weird elements arising strangely during
Teleny’s most explicitly pornographic moments, which foreclose the possibility
that sexual desire can ever be liberated into a healthy, unrepressed expression.
These episodes undermine characters’ sense of self-possession and make the
text an uncomfortable fit for the ‘reverse discourse’ narrative. The novel portrays
desire as not merely out of the individual’s control, but as a force residing outside
of and as a threat to the self. The first erotic encounter between the two main
characters occurs when Des Grieux attends a concert where Teleny is playing.
While listening to Teleny’s music, Des Grieux becomes hypnotically ‘spell-bound,
yet I could hardly tell whether it was with the composition, the execution, or
the player himself ’ and starts seeing visions of ‘the Alhambra’, ‘the sun-lit sands
of Egypt’, and ‘the gorgeous towns of Sodom and Gomorrah’ (pp. 6–7). Once
‘the pianist turned his head and cast one long, lingering, slumberous look’ at Des
Grieux, his hallucinations become more intense and explicitly erotic: ‘[A] heavy
hand seemed to be laid upon my lap’, Des Grieux recounts, ‘something was bent
and clasped and grasped, which made me faint with lust. The hand was moved up
and down, slowly at first, then fast and faster in went in rhythm with the song’,
bringing him to the brink of orgasm (p. 7). Later, during their first conversation,
Teleny asks Des Grieux if he ‘believe[s] in the transmission of thought, of feelings,
of sensations’ before revealing that he had the same visions, accompanied by a
desire for ‘that powerful withering love that shatters both the body and the soul’
(p. 15). ‘Our glances met, and then there was a current between us, like a spark
of electricity running along a wire, was it not?’ asks Teleny. ‘Yes, an uninterrupted
current’, responds Des Grieux (p. 18).
Caleb identifies this key moment in the novel, which is both the first explicitly
pornographic scene and, effectively, the beginning of Des Grieux and Teleny’s
romantic relationship, as partaking of the late Victorian discourses of ‘telepathy
and spiritualism’.28 This connection is solidified during a later moment, when
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Des Grieux describes how he was able to enter telepathically into the mind of
both Teleny and a woman known as ‘the Countess’ while they have a heterosexual
encounter; he makes reference to ‘the doings of the Psychical Society’, more
commonly known as the Society for Psychical Research, to explain how such a
phenomenon was possible (p. 57). For Caleb, this indicates the extent to which
the authors of Teleny had absorbed the latest scientific discourses, including
sexologists’ insights into role of ‘“psychic symptoms” […] in many cases of sexual
perversion’ (p. xv).29 By contrast, Robert Gray and Christopher Keep argue that
the novel’s language of sexual electrification ‘signifies the productive passing of
desire from one individual to another in the text’ in a way that mirror the round-
robin composition of the novel, and which resists cooptation to sexology’s naming
of the single, isolated, and pathological ‘homosexual’.30
Yet the paranormal qualities of Des Grieux’s experience of desire are shot
through with feelings of dread, fear of the unknown, and a loss of personal
agency in the face of an overwhelming material force that resides outside the self,
thereby presenting a sexualized version of the weird’s depiction of a threatening,
unknowable universe. He describes his psychic encounter with Teleny and the
Countess as preceded by the sense that ‘my inward self seemed to disintegrate itself
from my body’ (p. 50). When he becomes ‘spell-bound’ by his initial experience
of homoerotic desire, he gives up his individual agency in a manner that is as odd
and disturbing as it is attractive and alluring, surrendering himself to a disturbing
parody of sublime vision. After Teleny stops playing, Des Grieux’s fantasies mutate
from eroticism to horror. He sees Sodom and Gomorrah succumb to

a fiery hail, a rain of rubies and emeralds that was consuming

the cities of the plain, and he, the pianist, standing naked in
the lurid light, exposing himself to the thunderbolts of heaven
and to the flames of hell. As he stood there, I saw him—in my
madness—change all at once to the dog-headed God of Egypt,
then by degrees into a loathsome poodle. I shivered, felt sick,
but speedily changed into his own form again. (pp. 7–8)

Des Grieux’s vision transforms from awe-inspiring Biblical destruction and

mythical creatures from an exotic oriental past into an unsettling and campily
bizarre ‘poodle’, before he finally returns to normal.
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Unlike the feeling of ‘excitement but with horror’ that characterizes one’s
experience of the Kantian sublime, Des Grieux’s homoerotic fantasy partakes
of what China Miéville describes as weird fiction’s puncturing of ‘the supposed
membrane separating the sublime’ from more quotidian experiences, and ‘allows
swillage of that awe and horror from “beyond” back into the everyday [….] The
weird is a radicalised sublime backwash’.31 Rather than eliciting a new sense of
either self-knowledge or group identity, Des Grieux’s homoerotic experience
culminates in an odd mixture of melancholy and apprehension. ‘Analyzing my
feelings’, he says after having an odd sex dream where he imagines that Teleny is
his sister (a person who does not exist in real life, but only in Des Grieux’s fantasy),

I was now conscious that a new sensation has come over me—a
vague feeling of uneasiness and unrest. There was an emptiness
in me, still I could not understand if the void was in my heart or
in my head. I had lost nothing and yet I felt lonely, forlorn, nay
almost bereaved. (p. 22)

Des Grieux’s desire transforms into a ‘void’ and an ‘emptiness’, an unidentifiable

lack that creates a ‘vague’ and subtle sense of dread.
The vision of same-sex desire represented in Teleny, far from being a motivating
force for the articulation of a homosexual identity that seeks liberation from the
strictures of a compulsory heterosexuality, instead calls attention to the presence
of a disavowed violence driving the construction of any identity whatsoever that
bases itself upon sexual object choice. It is, in other words, a text that implicitly
rejects sexology’s attempt to discipline the unruliness of sexual desire through
the creation of quasi-scientific categories of identity based on object choice.
It presents sex as a chaotic force undermining the supposedly ‘natural’ laws of
Victorian domestic ideology and its disciplining of sexual impulses toward socially
productive ends, replacing it an understanding of sexuality as a destructive force
that is beyond human comprehension, and that seeks to obliterate both the subject
and the object of desire. When Des Grieux explains why he did not recognize the
presence of his homoerotic desires until the age of twenty-four, he states that

Withal, I never understood that I loved men and not women.

What I felt was that convulsion of the brain that kindles the
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eyes with a fire full of madness, and eager bestial delight, a fierce
sensual desire. Love, I thought, was a quiet chaffy drawing-
room flirtation, something soft, maudlin and aesthetic, quite
different from the passion full of rage and hatred which was
burning within me. (p. 34)

Retrospectively, Des Grieux believes his inability to comprehend his sexuality

stemmed from an opposition between the intellectual and the emotional, what
he ‘understood’ and what he ‘felt’. For him the concept of ‘love’ had nothing to
do with bodily sensations such as the ‘convulsion of the brain’, ‘bestial delight’
or ‘sensual desire’. Instead, he believes himself to have been indoctrinated into
a coercive ‘quiet chaffy drawing room flirtation’ ideology of love that completely
disavows the role of physical desire in romantic attachments. It is only when he
meets Teleny that he feels the ‘fire full of madness’ that is his first adult experience
of erotic attachment. Sharon Marcus has argued that, contrary to studies that view
nineteenth-century queer culture as inherently opposed to Victorian domestic
ideology, Teleny presents ‘a bond between male lovers organised around domestic
privacy, interiority, aestheticism, and sentiment’.32 Yet at this moment, Des Grieux
realizes that Victorian domestic ideology, which finds cultural expression in
narratives of genteel courtship between the sexes, has tricked him into believing
that romantic love had nothing to do with the ‘passion full of rage and hatred’
that is his experience of sexual desire. When he realizes that ‘sensual desire’ is the
unspoken yet omnipresent foundation undergirding romantic love, he can finally
articulate his true erotic orientation, that he ‘loved men and not women’.
Upon consideration, however, Des Grieux’s description of his erotic desires
as a ‘passion full of rage and hatred’ becomes strange, one might say ‘weird’,
insofar as they appear to be the exact opposite of what is commonly referred to
as the experience of ‘love’. To understand why this is so, it is important to keep
in mind the rhetorical work Des Grieux performs to impose coherence on his
sexual identity. He has the task of constructing a narrative that accounts for two
seemingly contradictory statements: first, that Des Grieux had a sexual attraction
towards other men that was always already there (as he says later, ‘I know that I
was born a sodomite, the fault is my constitution’s, not mine own’ [p. 47]); second,
that he did not become aware of that sexual attraction until a specific and particular
moment in his life, i.e. meeting Teleny. In order to make these two assertions cohere
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into a unified narrative of sexual maturation, he has recourse to the ‘quiet chaffy
drawing room flirtation’ model of romantic love, whose denial of the body made
it so that he did not understand what his erotic desires ‘really’ signified until those
desire were powerful enough with a ‘passion full of rage and hatred’ to obliterate
that socially instantiated discourse of romantic heterosexuality. Thus, the oddness
of Des Grieux’s violent articulation of his sexual desire becomes understandable:
for his narrative of sexual development to work, Des Grieux must experience his
sexuality as opposed to the ‘soft, maudlin and aesthetic’ ideology of genteel domestic
heterosexuality in order to negate it and therefore attain the knowledge of a sexual
orientation that was ‘really there all along’. To maintain both the coherence of
his sexual identity over time (‘I had always loved men instead of women’) and
account for the sudden realization of that identity (‘I finally realized I loved men
when I met Teleny’), Des Grieux must posit the existence of a hegemonic and
coercive ideology of genteel heterosexuality that becomes violently negated by an
experience of homosexual desire that is its exact opposite.
In this way, Des Grieux’s description of coming to understand his desires
echoes the less explicit, but no less disorienting, experience of Joseph Walters, the
‘young man with spectacles’ in Machen’s The Three Imposters. Walters narrates that
he participated in a pagan sexual ceremony by drinking ‘the Wine of the Fauns’
which

boiled in my veins, and stirred, I think, something that had slept

within me from the moment I was born. It seemed as if my self-
consciousness deserted me; I was no longer a thinking agent,
but at once subject and object. […] I was bidden to enjoy myself
and care for nothing but pleasure.33

This passage uses rhetoric similar to Des Grieux’s description of his coming to
sexual self-knowledge, but not for the purpose of establishing the innateness of
sexuality identity. Instead, Walters here depicts the violent, identity-annihilating
capacities of sexual desire, a drive seemingly detached from either ‘subject’ or ‘object’
that uses the body as a conduit for the proliferation of a weirdly disembodied
and impersonal ‘pleasure’ that echoes Bersani’s well-known description of desire
as the enjoyable dissolution of selfhood.34 When read through the lens of the
weird rather than the Foucauldian reverse discourse, Des Grieux’s account of his
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sexuality reads less like a liberal-humanist defense of his desires and more like an
admission of the horrifying nature of sexuality itself, a revelation that emerges
when it is untethered from the ‘chaffy drawing room affair’ of domesticity.

Weird Heterosexuality
Teleny repeatedly shows the chaotic force underlying all forms of sexuality,
both homo- and heteroerotic. The novel represents straight sex, perhaps to an
even greater extent than gay sex, as a ‘passion full of rage and hatred’, primarily
motivated by a drive to destroy both the subject and the object of erotic desire.
Early in the novel, Des Grieux relates in vivid and horrifying detail his memory
of an adolescent trip to a brothel with a group of school friends, where they
observe the ‘loathsome’ sight of a consumptive woman coughing up blood while
performing oral sex on another prostitute until she dies of a broken blood vessel,
with ‘the death-rattle of the one mixed […] up with the panting and gurgling of
the other’ (p. 45). In a passage that ironically echoes his description of the ‘passion
full of rage and hatred’ that is his experience of homoerotic desire, Des Grieux
describes how

the cantinière continued to writher in her senseless and

ungovernable rage, twisting and distorting herself; but at least
feeling the warm blood flow into her womb, and bathe her
inflamed parts […] began to pant, to scream, and to leap with
delight, for the ejaculation was at length taking place. (p. 45)

Although this is, obviously, a sexual act occurring between women, the fact that it is
done for the sexual arousal for a group of young men exposes reveals the perversity
underlying normative male desire. This episode is an especially vivid moment from
what the text’s overall trajectory of demystifying the heterosexual ‘laws of Nature’
by repeatedly calling attention to the violence underlying heteroerotic desire.
Later, Des Grieux describes an incident when his coachman raped his
chamber-maid, who had rejected the coachman’s offer of marriage. She does so
because Des Grieux had cruelly manipulated her into falling in love with him,
even after he realized he was primarily same-sex oriented, for his own amusement.
He explains that, at the moment of the rape, the coachman
80 SWPA 4

hardly knew whether he loved or hated this girl most, and he

cared but little what became of him provided he could satisfy
his craving for her. All the softness which love had awakened
gave way to the sexual energy of the male. […] It was hardly a
question with him now of pleasure given or received, it was the
wild overpowering eagerness which the male brute displays in
possessing the female, for you might have killed him, but he
would not have let go his hold. (pp. 74, 76)

The coachman’s masculine ‘sexual energy’ cancels out his entire range of affective
responses towards the girl, from ‘love’ all the way to ‘hatred’, even to the extent of
obliterating his desire for physical pleasure entirely. Desire is figured in terms of
appetite, the satisfaction of a ‘craving’ and an ‘overpowering eagerness’, such that it
undercuts not only the illusion of the desiring subject as a rationally willing being,
but even the assumption that sexual desire is ultimately about the maximization of
pleasure. Sexuality, instead, is presented as the male’s innate desire to submit to the
destruction of both himself and the object of his desire through an overwhelming
desire to ‘possess’ the female. It is thus that the novel demystifies the hypocrisy of
the Victorian domestic ideology, where the ‘soft, maudlin and aesthetic’ obscures
the destructiveness of a heterosexuality that, paradoxically, has the male assert
his sexual prerogative over the female by means of becoming ‘overpowered’ by an
antirational erotic appetite for destruction.
These passages are two especially vivid moments from what the text’s
concerted demystification of a ‘naturalized’ discourse of domestic heterosexuality
by repeatedly calling attention to the violence underlying heteroerotic desire.
The effect of this exposure is the sort of cosmic horror more typically associated
with weird fiction, which elicits madness and a self-destructive impulse in the
face of the unfathomable. This occurs when the chamber-maid kills herself after
being raped. As the coachman and Des Grieux both stand in the chamber-maid’s
bedroom, ‘she stood, not far from the window, her glances from the coachman
[falling] upon me with loathing and scorn. She now knew what the love of men
was’ (p. 78). Immediately after attaining this knowledge, she throws herself out
of the window to her death. Gazing upon the straight man who has raped her
and the gay man who does not want her yet has nonetheless ‘put her into his
Summer 2019 | Essays 81

power’ purely for his own enjoyment, her suicide is motivated not only by the
violence done against her person per se, but by her realization that ‘the love of
men’ is ultimately nothing but the desire to ‘satisfy a craving’ for power, and that
at the height of sexual passion, the identity of that craving’s object is entirely
incidental. Both men simply want to subordinate her into the object of their
own desires. In this, one of the few moments when the novel focuses on female
sexuality, the chamber-maid’s experience effectively eliminates the constitutive
difference between a homosexuality full of ‘rage and hatred’ and heterosexuality.
For a woman, the ‘love of men’ really is all the same, insofar as all male sexuality is
a ‘passion full of rage and hatred’ that works towards the obliteration of the object
of erotic desire through a destructive and seemingly impersonal sexual appetite.

Sodomical Annihilation
The incident of the chamber-maid’s suicide, by focusing on the similarity between
male heterosexuality’s and male homosexuality’s capacities to abuse women,
forcefully calls attention to persistence of violence that is the result of the unequal
power dynamic that exists between the sexes in a patriarchal society.35 Yet the
text also presents the gay sex that is its primary pornographic focus, and which
it supposedly valorizes, as similarly violent and reason-destroying expression, a
‘paroxysm of erotic rage’ and ‘mad delirium’ inherent to sex itself (Teleny, p. 99).
In the case of male homosexuality, sexual encounters are portrayed as radically
destructive of the boundary between the subject and the object of erotic desire,
rather than the destruction of the object of desire by itself. This becomes shockingly
literal in the scene depicting Des Grieux’s attendance at his first gay orgy, which
culminates with a character called ‘the Spahi’ asking to be anally penetrated by a
glass bottle. First, the experience obliterates the distinction between mind and
body, reason and sensation, with the Spahi saying that it makes him feel ‘a sharp
and yet agreeable irritation from the bum up to my brain’ (p. 134). This enjoyable
confusion of the higher and the lower faculties soon transforms into violence
when the bottle breaks inside him, ‘cutting all the edges that pressed against it, the
other part remaining engulfed within the anus’ causing him to emit a ‘loud scream
of pain and terror’ (p. 135). Too ashamed and afraid of ruining his reputation to
go to the hospital, he shoots himself with a revolver rather than allowing himself
to die slowing of an infection. The Spahi’s sexual desire leads him to abandon all
82 SWPA 4

reason in an act that pleasurably, and then horrifyingly, destroys the boundary
between the subject and object of desire—here, literally an inanimate object—and
then destroys both altogether.
This same process occurs, albeit more subtly, in the ostensibly more romantic
sexual encounters between the novel’s two main characters. When describing his
first actually physical encounter with Teleny, Des Grieux describes that, ‘as my
hands wandered over his head, his neck, his shoulders, his arms, I could not feel
him at all; in fact, it seemed to me as if I were touching my own body’ (p. 89).
While he experiences his first homosexual contact as if Teleny were an extension
of his own corporeal self that erases the physical boundary between himself and
the object of his desire, further sexual encounters erase the boundary between
himself and Teleny as psychologically distinct entities. Later, after another sexual
encounter, Des Grieux describes them as

unconscious of everything save the pleasure of feeling each

other’s bodies, which, however, seemed to have lost their own
individuality, mingled and confounded as they were together.
Apparently we had but one head and one heart, for they beat in
such unison, and the same vague thoughts flitted through both
our brains. (p. 149)

These descriptions gesture towards a Platonic ideal of homosexual love the uniting
of two separate beings into a single entity. Although the process of this merging
might be violent, it results in the creation of a newly unified, wholly complete
being.
Although Des Grieux presents this erasure of the boundary between subject
and object as positive and enlightening, there is also a dark underside to this
experience that comes through in his descriptions. Describing his orgasm while
penetrating Teleny for the first time, Des Grieux declares,

I was melting away, but he never stopped till he had quite

drained me of the last drop of life-giving fluid there was in me.
My eyes were swimming in their sockets. I felt my heavy lids
half close themselves; an unbearable voluptuousness of mingled
Summer 2019 | Essays 83

pain and pleasure, shattered my body and blasted my very soul;

then everything waned in me. He clasped me in his arms, and
I swooned away whist he was kissing my cold and languid lips.
(p. 106)

The vampiric overtones of this passage are especially odd considering that Des
Grieux is actually playing the ‘active’, penetrative role in this sexual encounter.
However, his penetration of Teleny results in a passive ‘melting away’ and a
‘draining of life-giving fluid’ that makes him ‘swoon away’ as the victim of Teleny’s
experienced sexual maneuverings. This paradoxical passivity is described in terms
of Des Grieux’s ‘soul’ being ‘blasted’ and his ‘body’ being ‘shattered’, as if his orgasm
caused him to lose the sense of his body as a discrete entity, which is experienced
as a radical and nearly fatal loss of both physical and mental identity. Des Grieux
describes another orgasm as leaving him ‘crushed and annihilated; then a pleasant
state of torpor followed, and my eyes closed for a few seconds in happy oblivion’ (p.
116). Applying the rhetoric of shattering and blasting, crushing and annihilating
to the post-orgasmic loss of proprioception partakes of the discourse of the
sublime. Yet Des Grieux depicts his experience not as a desire for pleasure strong
enough that it erases the confining boundary between the erotic subject and the
erotic object. Instead, sex enacts the desire to destroy oneself by allowing it to be
subsumed into the body and mind of another being.
Gay sex becomes an opportunity to engage in what Luckhurst has described
as the ‘disorientation’ characteristic of the weird, which ‘inheres in perversity
or transgression. It twists or veers away from familiar frames and binary
distributions’.36 He quotes Bruno Latour to describe how weird disorientations
create opportunities for ‘new entanglements that ‘have no clear boundaries, no
well-defined essences, no sharp separation between their own hard kernel and
the environment’.37 This makes weird fiction ‘a place for potentially radical
disarticulations and reformulations of traditional binaries, starting with self and
other, subject and object’. Far from being an apologia for homosexuality in the
terms of the Foucauldian reverse discourse, the novel instead presents sex between
men as an occasion for a disorienting experience of horror mingled with pleasure
that ‘dethrones the subject’. However, this horror is not rooted in the ‘panic and
disgust’ of homophobia and gay panic, but instead in the chaotic force of sex itself,
84 SWPA 4

which always escapes attempts to discipline it, whether through the social controls
of Victorian domestic ideology’s gender binary or the proliferating categories of
sexual pathology created by the sexologists.38
Ultimately, the tragedy of Teleny is not, as some critics have maintained,
that late-Victorian society had no place for healthy gay sex—in the universe of
the novel, no sex is truly healthy. Rather, the novel represents all sexual acts as
‘passions full of rage and hatred’ that are inscribed in a discourse that forecloses
the possibility of sexual liberation through the rights-based logic of liberalism. The
novel’s very raison d’être as an explicitly pornographic text is to inscribe, in vividly
grotesque terms, the destructive logic of sexuality itself, forcing readers to think
beyond the binaries of man/woman, gay/straight that were hallmarks of Victorian
social and scientific discourse. That a novel demonstrates this level of awareness
at the supposed inaugural moment of modern homosexual identity should give
historians of sexuality pause. Teleny invites us reimagine the history of sexuality
not as a teleological movement away from the repressive hypothesis, but instead as
a constantly reiterating investigation of desire’s inherent capacity for destruction.

American University
dustinfr@american.edu

NOTES
1
Charles Hirsch, ‘Notice bibliographique extraite des notes and souvenirs d’un vieux bibliopole’, in
Attributed to Oscar Wilde and Others, Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal: A Physiological Romance
of Today, ed. and trans. by Amanda Mordavsky Caleb (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt Books, 2010),
p. 172; Further references to this edition appear in parentheses.
2
Brian Reade, Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in Literature 1850-1900 (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 49.
3
James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 35.
4
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin,
1978), p. 43.
5
Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Weird: A Dis/Orientation’, Textual Practice, 31.6 (2017), 1041–1061 (p. 1047).
6
Leif Sorensen, ‘A Weird Modernist Archive: Pulp Fiction, Pseudobiblia, H.P. Lovecraft’, Modernism/
modernity 17.3 (2010), 501–22 (p. 506).
7
Leonard Smithers, ‘Adverts Prospectus for Teleny’, in Peter Mendes, Clandestine Erotic Fiction in
English, 1890–1930: A Bibliographic Study (Brookfield: Ashgate, 1993), p. 252; quoted in Caleb,
‘Introduction’, pp. xxi–xxii.
8
Caleb, ‘Introduction’, p. xxii.
Summer 2019 | Essays 85

9
Joseph Bristow, ‘“A Few Drops of Thick, White, Viscid Sperm”: Teleny and the Defense of the Phallus’
in Porn Archives, ed. by Tim Dean, Steven Ruszczycy, and David Squires (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2014), pp. 144–60 (p. 145). Bristow notes that the text asserts the robust health of
the ‘man-loving penis’ in response to a ‘medicolegal establishment’ that sought to pathologize the
male homosexual body (pp. 154, 158). I argue, however, that such moments often transform into
the phallic sublimity that is one of the hallmarks of weird fiction’s disorienting effects.
10
Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents, p. 36.
11
See Godfrey Brangham, ‘John Lane and Arthur Machen: A Correspondence’, Faunus: The Journal of
the Friends of Arthur Machen 16 (2007), 3–19.
12
Arthur Machen, The London Adventure; or, the Art of Wandering (London: Martin Secker, 1924), pp.
48, 11; Luckhurst, ‘The Weird’, p. 1049.
13
H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, ed. E.F. Bleiler (New York: Dover, 1973), p. 16.
14
James Machin, ‘Weird Fiction and the Virtues of Obscurity: Machen, Stenbock, and the Weird
Connoisseurs’, Textual Practice 31.6 (2017), 1063–1081 (p. 1063). Machin takes his definition of
‘mode’ from Veronica Hollinger, ‘Genre vs. Mode’ in The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, ed. by
Rob Latham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 139–51.
15
Luckhurst, ‘The Weird’, p. 1034.
16
Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 43.
17
Sonja Ruehl, ‘Inverts and Experts: Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Identity’, in Feminist Criticism and
Social Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture, ed. by Judith Newton and Deborah
Rosenfelt (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 165–80 (p. 167).
18
Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, p. 15.
19
Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 101.
20
Ibid.
21
Aaron Ho, ‘Why Read Teleny?’, The Oscholars: Special Teleny Issue (2008, rev. 2017), http://www.
oscholars.com/Teleny/ho.htm.
22
Ed Cohen, ‘Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation’, PMLA 102
(1987), 801–13 (p. 803).
23
Cohen, ‘Writing Gone Wilde’, p. 804. Wilde’s involvement in Teleny is also suggested in William
A. Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press,
1996), p. 210; and Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment
(London: Cassell, 1994), p. 18.
24
Lisa Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914 (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), pp. 117, 115.
25
Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality: 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), p. 104. More recently, Antonio Sanna has used Foucault’s framework to argue that
Teleny represents how ‘[t]he aggressive enactment of heteronormative legislative power caused
the systematic silencing of late-nineteenth-century homosexuals, who came to be very concerned
about the possibility of being publicly exposed and ruined’. Antonio Sanna, ‘Silent Homosexuality
in Oscar Wilde’s Teleny and The Picture of Dorian Gray and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde’, Law and Literature 24.1 (2012), 21–39 (p. 24).
26
Diane Mason, The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Literature and Medical Culture (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2008), pp. 75–76.
27
Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 3.
28
Caleb, ‘Introduction’, p. xiv.
29
Caleb quotes from L. Thoinot and Arthur W. Weysse, Medicolegal Aspects of Moral Offenses
(Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Company, 1911), pp. 269–70.
30
Robert Gray and Christopher Keep, ‘  “An uninterrupted current”: Homoeroticism and Collaborative
Authorship in Teleny’, in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of
86 SWPA 4

Authorship’, ed. by Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2006), pp. 193–208 (p. 198).
31
China Miéville, ‘Weird Fiction’, in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Mark Bould,
Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 510–16
(p. 511).
32
Sharon Marcus, ‘At Home with the Other Victorians’, South Atlantic Quarterly 108.1 (2009), 119–45
(p. 135).
33
Arthur Machen, The Three Imposters; or, The Transmutations (London: John Lane, 1895), p. 263.
34
Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, October 43 (1987), 197–222 (p. 218).
35
Christopher Wellings notes how in Teleny ‘women are treated throughout the text […] not [as]
individuals, but archetypes of the female, defined solely in relation to male perceptions of their
sexualities, or lack thereof ’. While he is undoubtedly right to identify a thread of misogynistic
disgust that runs throughout the text, I argue that the impulse to depersonalization characterizes
every sexual encounter in the novel. Christopher Wellings, ‘Dangerous Desires: The Uses of
Women in Teleny’, The Oscholars: Special Teleny Issue (2008, rev. 2017), http://www.oscholars.com/
Teleny/wellings.htm.
36
Luckhurst, ‘The Weird’, p. 1052.
37
Ibid. Luckhurst quotes Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring Sciences into Democracy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 22.
38
Luckhurst, ‘The Weird’, p. 1053.